Screen Sound Journal N5

SCREEN SOUND The Australasian Journal of Soundtrack Studies Screen Sound n5, 2015 Screen Sound: The Australasian Journal of Soundtrack Studies Number 5, 2015 Screen Sound is a peer-refereed research journal edited by Natalie Lewandowski (Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University, Brisbane) with the assistance of Philip Hayward (UTS, Sydney) and site editor and designer Alex Mesker (Macquarie University, Sydney). Editorial Board: • Giorgio Biancorosso (University of Hong Kong) • Anne Cranny-Francis (University of Technology Sydney, Australia) • Mark Evans (University of Technology Sydney, Australia) • Jon Fitzgerald (Southern Cross University, Australia) • Michael Hannan (Southern Cross University, Australia) • Roger Hillman (Australian National University, ACT) • Henry Johnson (University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ) • Kyoko Koizumi (Otsuma Women’s University, Tokyo, Japan) • Theo Van Leeuwen (University of Technology Sydney, Australia) • James Wierzbicki (University of Sydney, Australia) • Nabeel Zuberi (University of Auckland, NZ) Industry Advisory Board: • Martin Armiger (AFTRS) • Matthew Davies (NFSA, ASRA) • Matthew Hancock (Screen Australia) • Glenda Keam (Composers Association of NZ) • Jo Smith (AGSC) • Mark Ward ISSN 1838-3343 (Print) ISSN 1838-3351 (Online) e-correspondence address: [email protected] The opinions expressed in articles in this journal are those of the authors alone. Copyright for articles published in this journal is held jointly by the authors and Screen Sound and no reproduction of material is permitted without written agreement by all parties. Screen Sound: The Australasian Journal of Soundtrack Studies was initiated and developed as part of Australia Research Council Discovery Project Grant DP0770026 ‘Music production and technology in Australian film: enabling Australian film to embrace innovation’, funded 2007-2010. Cover image: Summer Heights High, Princess Pictures. Screen Sound n5, 2015 Screen Sound: The Australasian Journal of Soundtrack Studies Number 5, 2015 −Soundtracks across media, genre & series Contents Editorial: Soundtracks across media, genre & series 4 Natalie Lewandowski Theme Features: Soundtracks across media, genre & series ‘We Can’t Sleep in the Movies Any More’: Talkies and the 5 – 18 Legitimisation of Australian Jazz Bruce Johnson Hard Boiled Music: The Case of L.A. Noire 19 – 35 Iain Hart The Scent of Success: Image-Sound Relations and Audio-logo- 36 – 50 visuality in Baz Luhrmann’s Two Promotional Films for Chanel No.5 Perfume Philip Hayward and Matt Hill Sound Across Series: Theme Tunes as Leitmotif in Chris Lilley’s 51 – 63 Television Series Liz Giuffre and Mark Evans Additional Features Picturing Sound: An Interview with Screen Composer Graeme 64 – 75 Perkins Henry Johnson Contributor Profiles 76 – 77 Screen Sound n5, 2015 EDITORIAL Soundtracks across media, genre & series Natalie Lewandowski This Screen Sound 2015 issue features a collection of articles that address the theme of soundtracks across media, genre and series. Each of the articles exemplifies how, despite varied media outputs, those working on the films have similarities in approach, marketing and execution. Historically, as demonstrated in Johnson’s article, the marketing of national interests and progress were intertwined with the audio and visual text. In the articles which examine more recent texts, Hart, Hayward and Hill, Giuffre and Evans all demonstrate how across various media the music continues to provide a link across series, brand or auteur (in the case of Chris Lilley). Lastly, Johnson’s interview with Screen Composer Graeme Perkins illustrates how working within the industry requires flexibility in compositional techniques and style, even within the one media output of documentary. Screen Sound Update The Editorial team has changed to include Natalie Lewandowski as Editor, and Philip Hayward as Deputy Editor. Our site editor and designer, Alex Mesker will be taking leave from working on Screen Sound to work on his thesis on sound and music in Hanna-Barbera’s cartoons. I’d like to thank Alex for all of his work on Screen Sound Journal since its inception. From 2016, Screen Sound will be published in a ‘special issue’ format, reflecting the changing editorial board and aligning with significant organisations and events to do with all matters sound and screen in Australasia. We would welcome affiliation with panels, conferences and events in order to collaborate on outcomes. Screen Sound is pleased to receive comments on its articles, direction and scope from researchers in diverse fields relevant to Australasian screen sound. Acknowledgements: Screen Sound: The Australasian Journal of Soundtrack Studies was founded by Rebecca Coyle and developed as part of Australia Research Council Discovery Project Grant DP0770026 ‘Music production and technology in Australian film: enabling Australian film to embrace innovation’. Screen Sound n5, 2015 ‘WE CAN’T SLEEP IN THE MOVIES ANY MORE’ Talkies and the Legitimization of Australian Jazz1 Bruce Johnson Abstract My interest in this essay is not so much in the way improvised music might be deployed in film, as in the way it has been represented. More specifically, I wish to investigate a transformation in the cinematic representation of the most durable and influential improvised music of the twentieth century: jazz. It is the transformation of jazz from being a despised foreigner to becoming a respected citizen, and this transformation took place in virtually every international diasporic destination. This enquiry began with the question: how and why did jazz, a music identified so closely with both ‘primitive’ blackness, and with US modernity, become assimilated to national identities in most of its diasporic destinations by the late twentieth century? In almost all those destinations jazz was initially regarded as deeply disruptive to the traditions on which local identity was built, yet within decades became fully at home in these diasporic ‘marginal’ sites. How was this radical reversal achieved? Keywords Jazz, improvisation, diaspora, The Sydney Harbour Bridge When jazz first arrived in Australia towards the end of the First World War, it carried messages that were for many deeply offensive to the idea of ‘Australia’. These included its African or ‘negroid’ connections. The statement in the July 1918 issue of Australian Variety and Show World that jazz is “a Negro expression for noise, peculiar to music” (cited Johnson, 1987: 4) establishes jazz as an enemy to civilisation and refinement. For what appears to have been the world’s first jazz festival, the Jazz Week held at the Globe Theatre in Sydney in 1919, the publicity reflected a belief that jazz signalled the decline of western civilisation: Does the Jazz Lead to Destruction? The answer was clearly and defiantly yes (an early example of the marketing of transgressive alternativity). As in most diasporic sites, jazz was a bearer of a modernity that 1 I wish to acknowledge with thanks the research fellowships awarded to me for two successive years, 2008 and 2009, by Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA), and which provided me with access to the material I use in this essay. This article develops several of the lines of enquiry that emerged from those Fellowships in a paper for NFSA Journal (see Johnson 2009), and a conference paper presented at The Jazz Chameleon: The 9th Nordic Jazz Conference held at the Finnish Jazz & Pop Archive, Helsinki, August 19–20, 2010. SSJ n5, 2015 — Johnson: ‘We Can’t Sleep in the Movies Any More’ 6 threatened local traditions and received values. Decadent and transgressive, its association with extravagant modern dance and the young female flapper carried the suggestion of degraded effeminisation. This had particular implications in a country that was so strongly masculinised. The extraordinary imbalance between the numbers of men compared to women from the beginning of European settlement (Blainey, 2003: 336) strengthened the masculinisation that is characteristic of frontier societies. National character was defined through rural narratives of outdoor labour through which a man realised his spirit and resourcefulness. The city on the other hand softened and feminised, exposing one to the depraved imported contamination of ‘jazz parties’. This dichotomy provided a structuring device in narratives of nation, particularly early film: the young country woman lured like a moth to the city or the young man throwing away his talents as a prodigal urban wastrel. Both risked destruction at jazz parties, but were then saved by a return to the solid values of the bush tradition that underpinned all that was heroic in national identity. Australia’s early prolific feature film output thus became a medium for the negotiation between jazz and national identity, the latter most frequently articulated through the values of the bush. Film was a particularly effective forum for constructing and circulating these narratives. As a technology born with the twentieth century, film was among the most effective vehicles for messages about the modern world. For Australians it was from its beginnings one of the most powerful ways through which the collective consciousness was internationalised. In the earliest period there was a far greater range of foreign films exhibited than later became the norm as the US achieved dominance (Collins, 1987:46). Reviewing a film of the streets of Budapest in 1909, The Bulletin commented that it enabled people to attend “feeling

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